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Champion woman says MS diagnosis is no reason to change her dreams and plans
By Ed Runyan
CHAMPION
It started Oct. 29, 2013, with numbness in her right hand that spread to her elbow and shoulder. Over the course of about a month, it spread to every part of Nicole Sandrella’s body.
Sandrella, who at the time was a junior at Kent State University at Trumbull who liked sports, ran and worked at the Champion McDonald’s, started to fall when she walked and needed help doing nearly everything.
“You’re 20 years old, and you feel like you’re a toddler again because you physically cannot get dressed or even wash your hair. My mom and my sister had to help with that,” she said.
The Champion woman and her family sought answers at the emergency room, from their family doctor and specialists. A diagnosis of transverse myelitis was given, and she received steroid treatments and occupational therapy.
To complete the fall 2013 semester at college, she received help from note-takers and took her tests separately from other students to give her extra time.
By Feb. 4, however, after a spinal tap, she had a different and more definitive answer: multiple sclerosis.
“I think the part where I was most sad or confused or discouraged was when I didn’t have an answer” to what was wrong, she said in a recent interview.
“I don’t like when things are not under my control. When I was numb, and I wasn’t able to do anything, that was so frustrating having to rely on my mom and my sister, my boyfriend, my brother.
“But once I was diagnosed, I cried for five minutes in the office just because I was relieved that I had an answer in that I knew here were my options – X,Y,Z. I can get on this medication, on this medication, how many times I have to get an MRI per year and just focus on that,” Sandrella said.
Multiple sclerosis causes the immune system to attack the central nervous system, which includes the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.
There is no cure, but medications can help with flare ups by creating a “shield” around the spinal cord and brain, giving them a “second defense” when the condition recurs, she said.
She has a type of MS that occurs in stages of relapse and remission. Her numbness almost entirely went away within a year of her diagnosis. For more than a year, she’s had just two symptoms – numbness in her left hand and occasional fatigue.
People she meets – including customers at Quaker Steak and Lube in Cortland where she works – don’t know she has a health condition, she said. “No one notices it. I know when I tell people at first, they don’t believe it,” Sandrella said.
She lives her life almost as though she doesn’t have the disease. Television personality Jack Osborne and former talk-show host Montel Williams are among other people who have MS.
One of her inspirations is Kayla Montgomery, a successful long-distance runner from North Carolina who has MS.
“You can’t stop living your life however you want to,” Sandrella said. “Whatever plans you have, keep those. And go for them, just like you would before the diagnosis. I don’t feel like it’s changed me. If it has, I think it’s for the better. Just to keep living every day. I don’t feel like I’m unlucky, that my time has been cut short or that I’m limited.”
Sandrella, 22, graduated from Kent State at Trumbull earlier this month with a double major in English and psychology and is now working toward her teaching certificate at Youngstown State University. She plans to be a teacher.
“I feel like everyone has something in their lives, and if mine is MS, then that’s OK,” she said. “I can’t be upset the rest of my life. When I was diagnosed, I was 20. What am I going to be depressed and miserable for – let’s think hopefully – 80-plus years? I don’t think that’s the way to live."